1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to diagnostics in computer information systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to providing an interface to system monitors to facilitate creation and management of rule sets.
2. Background of the Invention
Computer monitors use alarms to indicate problems or error conditions with a running computer application. These monitor systems are commonly used on high availability systems and Internet servers. Monitor systems typically use rule sets to determine what constitutes a problem for a particular computer application. These rule sets are typically entered manually by an administrator, and require the administrator to enter each rule to be used. These rules can include message text, alarm behavior, files to scan and other information that the system monitor uses to determine how to process a particular alarm.
Custom computer applications have different requirements for generating alarms in response to problems or error conditions encountered during the application's execution. Because such custom responses to errors or other problem conditions are not known to conventional system monitors, they must be manually entered into a rules file that a system monitor can access to determine how to handle particular messages. Such manual entry is inefficient and prone to error.
Moreover, these requirements can change as an application matures. Thus, modification and/or enhancements to the computer application may require modifications in the rule sets used by the system monitor. These modifications would also require manual entry using conventional systems.